Software teams have long realized the return on investment (ROI) of software configuration management (SCM) systems, which have been used by software teams for decades to manage development, improve collaboration, and coordinate releases. In fact, SCM systems have become such an integral part of a software development environment that practically no significant software project is even started without a SCM methodology in place. Over the last decade, hardware design teams have encountered the same market forces as software designers: increased competition due to globalization, mandating the use of the best available engineers irrespective of location; an exponential increase in design complexity; and shrinking market windows. The result has been larger teams of engineers spread across multiple sites, managing complex flows, and sharing a large volume of constantly changing data. They need hardware configuration management (HCM) systems.